The Detroit automaker wants your next vehicle to be a personal assistant, a best friend, and an autonomous errand-runner. Americans spent about 95 billion hours behind the wheel last year, traveling something like 2.76 trillion miles . On Wednesday, General Motors executives are outlining the future of automotive at the company's annual GM Forward event in New York City, and they say their goal isn't to reduce that number. But GM does want to make car time better. Or, as Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson put it in an interview with WIRED, "make it more productive, make it more relaxing, make it more engaging. We'd like to make your vehicle a more central, more useful part of your life than it has been historically."

This Startup Is All In on Recursive Self-Improvement. Recursive makes the case that the benefits of using AI to build AI outweigh the risks. For the past few days I've been testing an impressive open-weight AI coding model called Flint. It suggests that fully recursive self-improvement, or RSI--an exciting and controversial approach that uses AI to build AI--is getting closer. Flint is the first offering from Recursive, a company that aims to use RSI to advance both AI itself and other areas of science using AI .

At Nvidia's GTC in Berlin, Huang unveiled their new plug-in data center--the DSX Pod--as the key to unlocking Europe's AI infrastructure lag. Jensen Huang outlined his vision of Europe's future at Nvidia's global conference in Berlin on Wednesday. It consists of robotics, AI agents, and modular data centers, with Nvidia unsurprisingly powering it all. "To be part of this AI economy, you don't want to just be consuming the AI. You want to be producing the AI," he told the 4,000-strong crowd at Nvidia's GTC.

A plan to funnel the heat given off by data centers into nearby homes has run aground in Germany. Across Europe, policymakers are weighing AI ambitions against climate objectives. Earlier this year, the German government laid out an ambitious plan: By 2030, it would double the scale of the country's data center fleet, and quadruple the amount of compute available for running artificial intelligence models. The idea was to minimize Germany's dependence on the United States for access to AI--a point of concern across Europe--and boost its faltering economy. However, Germany has found that its AI ambitions are butting up against its climate commitments.

WIRED was the first magazine to cover Theranos and its enticing billionaire founder. There were warning signs even then. Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of the fraud-ridden blood-test company Theranos, made her national press debut in The Wall Street Journal in 2013. It ran in the Opinion section, by a writer on the Journal's editorial board named Joseph Rago, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for critiques of the Affordable Care Act. He wrote that he was impressed by the prospect of individuals having more direct control of their health care; no less an eminence than former secretary of state George Shultz, a Theranos board member, had told Rago that Holmes was the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. By 2014, Holmes was the youngest woman billionaire ever, and the mid-2010s were electric with tech-industry success stories--the iPhone, Tesla, Airbnb, Twitter.

Disney Asked Character.AI to Go Bankrupt for a Get-Out-of-Lawsuits Card The entertainment giant hopes to get trust and safety tech, among other IP, from a startup whose chatbots dozens of states allege encouraged minors to self-harm and kill their parents. This week, Character.AI declared bankruptcy. While some saw the fall of a chatbot platform as a harbinger for the industry, court filings indicate that the decision was actually a key part of a deal that has let Disney hire most of Character.AI's staff--including its now former CEO Karandeep Anand --potentially acquire most of Character.AI's technology, and avoid the beleaguered startup's many legal liabilities and obligations. In the past few years, Character.AI has faced multiple private lawsuits over the safety of its chatbots, as well as investigations from regulators around the world. In a declaration filed as part of the bankruptcy, Character.AI's newly appointed CEO explained that the goal of the bankruptcy was to reach a "consensual resolution" with personal injury claimants and a group of states investigating the company, while maximizing the value of the company's assets for shareholders.

Adult performers are questioning why Meta allows its AI agent to sext while restricting their social media accounts. The generative AI revolution hasn't been kind to Vanniall, an OnlyFans creator who lives in New York City. She now constantly finds hyperrealistic deepfakes --AI-generated images and videos that copy everything about her-- circulating online and often isn't able to get them removed. On top of that, Vanniall struggles to build an audience on popular social media platforms, like Instagram, without getting in trouble. "There's always some sort of report or appeal that I'm going through with them," she tells WIRED.

Katie Zacharia Was Linked to an AI Rare-Earths Startup. It's Even Weirder Than It Sounds The short-lived White House press secretary was listed as an adviser to a Kristi Noem-linked company that aims to use AI for mining. Both the company and she say she never worked there. Before being fired five days into her stint as White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia spent much of the day attempting to explain her past. Throughout her brief tenure, Zacharia's resume was the source of much intrigue.

This week on, we dive into an unexpected Muse feature, shadowy spending from the largest pro-AI super PAC, and men's tendency to lie about how much they know about AI. Turns out, Meta's AI agent Muse goes well beyond managing your calendar: it will also sext with you. This week on, Brian Barrett and Leah Feiger are joined by WIRED reporter Reece Rogers to discuss how he put it to the test--and ended up getting more than he bargained for. Plus, why the largest pro-AI super PAC network is funneling millions into shadowy LLCs, how Apple's new HomeView underwhelmed us, and a study that found men tend to overestimate how much they actually know about AI. Write to us at [email protected] . I Got My Muse AI Agent to Sext Me--and Meta Says That's Totally Fine Men Can't Stop Faking How Much They Know About AI You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link . We wanted to share with you that is a finalist for not one or two, but three Signal Awards. The judges pick who wins, but listeners also have a say with the listeners' choice vote. You can go to the links we included in the show notes and vote for us. We promise it takes just a minute and your vote goes a long way.

Kids' Content Is Deeply Broken. Low-quality AI-generated content currently dominates children's media. Maka, a streaming platform run by child development experts, is offering an alternative. If you have young kids or if you know somebody who does, then you know about YouTube's AI slop problem. Videos targeted at children on the platform are often filled with bizarre and hyperstimulating content that's AI generated .